Trafficking the Earth

Traces of Nitrate is an arts research collective devoted to documenting the extraction of minerals from Chile and their material transformations as they enter the capitalist system through financial markets of the City of London, UK.
Ignacio Acosta, Louise Purbrick and Xavier Ribas have been working together for ten years. Our first project, Traces of Nitrate: Mining History and Photography Between Britain and Chile, from which we now take as the name of our collective, Traces of Nitrate, tracked between archives and landscapes in London, Liverpool, Swansea and the Atacama Desert to explore relationships between historical and contemporary forms of copper and nitrate mining. Traces of Nitrate produced a series individual works, images and exhibitions, articles and books, that are all located on this website. We have also created a collective work, Trafficking the Earth, that distils our documentation into a dispositive that exposes the historical constellations of loss and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by the extraction and export of nitrate and copper.
Solid Water, Frozen Time, Future Justice: Photography and Mining in the Andean Glaciers, shortened as Frozen Future, is our newest project. We have widened our geographical scope to glacial systems of the Central Andes and have returned to the Salar de Atacama. Our focus is also extended through closer collaborations with activists and local communities and the use of sound, but photography and video are still at the centre of our work. Frozen Future experiments with the spatial and temporal collisions that can be created by photography to expose the global relationships, legacies and inequalities of capitalism, colonialism and extractivism. The historical and colonial relation we continue to explore is that between Chile and Britain, which has shaped the contemporary journey of minerals, lithium and copper, that fuel electric and digital technologies. They may be called ‘green’ yet they are dependent upon highly industrialised mining operations, often occluded from public view, that irreversively deplete the water reserves of local communities. Mining has reshaped the living spaces of earthly landscapes and altered the course of waterways. The work of Frozen Future is the documentation of the extractivism and the consequent disruption of its water cycles to seek ecological justice.